A lecture theatre painted womb-red. Headphones and an instruction sheet – we’re going on a journey, welcome onboard. An empty stage, populated by a pair of lady’s shoes and a pair of rather brief briefs. The lights are dim, there’s a hum in the air. We await instructions.
Headphones on, and we are taken on an aural rollercoaster ride that pitches the thrills of the fairground against the rush of sexual excitement, the crash of the waves into our bodies as we enter the sea, and the adrenalin surge of the moment before crashing in a car or a plane. The words are poetic, rhythmical, resonant. The voice is sensuous, soporific almost, with a purr that would do Eartha Kitt proud. We are lulled, we are seduced. There are moments of total blackout that allow us to momentarily drift into other worlds. ‘This is not real,’ she says, ‘but your body doesn’t know that.’ The electrical charges are the same, the hormones pumped are the same. It’s a provocation that intrigues us: from a cognitive psychology perspective, how do we know when we are experiencing ‘reality’? We’ve seen The Matrix and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, we’ve played video games, we know about Artificial Intelligence. Now we are sitting here, ruminating on the fact that storytelling has always, from the dawn of time, been about transporting us to other times and places whilst we sit in the dark listening; and that theatre has always been about suspending disbelief. We are here and now, but we are also there and then.
As we come out of one such blackout, we see the shoes on the stage space have been occupied. A lone female performer, a woman in a red dress (Sleepwalk Collective’s Iara Solano Arana) is standing stock-still, speaking into a mic and smiling at us. We see her mouthing the words, and we hear the words in our ears. She toys with us, sending sound from the left to the right earphone. She dares us to look at her, really look at her. She paints us, sitting there with our headphone wires linking us together, as a multi-headed beast, there to devour her. She offers herself to our gaze, plays with the sexuality of the situation, then makes us uncomfortable with suggestions of a story of sexual abuse.
Amusements combines powerful performance, poetic writing, and daring scenographic choices to great results. It’s only the second show by this enterprising new company (and a word here to the offstage half of the equation, Sammy Metcalfe, co-creator of the company’s work) and it confirms that they are rising stars in the ‘total theatre’ firmament. A beautiful show.